United States v. Wooden

• Decision Date: 06 September 2012
• Docket Number: No. 11–7226.,11–7226.
• Citation: 693 F.3d 440
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Petitioner–Appellant, v. Walter WOODEN, Respondent–Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

693 F.3d 440

UNITED STATES of America, Petitioner–Appellant,

v.Walter WOODEN, Respondent–Appellee.

No. 11–7226.

United States Court of Appeals,Fourth Circuit.

Argued: May 17, 2012.

Decided: Sept. 6, 2012.

ARGUED: Ian James Samuel, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., for Appellant. Eric Joseph Brignac, Office of the Federal Public Defender, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Tony West, Assistant Attorney General, Mark B. Stern, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.; Thomas G. Walker, United States Attorney, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellant. Thomas P. McNamara, Federal Public Defender, G. Alan DuBois, Assistant Federal Public Defender, Office of the Federal Public Defender, Raleigh, North Carolina, for Appellee.

Before TRAXLER, Chief Judge, and MOTZ and KEENAN, Circuit Judges.

Reversed and remanded by published opinion. Chief Judge TRAXLER wrote the opinion, in which Judge MOTZ and Judge KEENAN joined.

OPINION

TRAXLER, Chief Judge:

Approximately three months before Walter Wooden was to be released from federal prison, the government sought to commit him as a “sexually dangerous person,” 18 U.S.C.A. § 4248(a) (West Supp.2012), under the civil-commitment provisions of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 (the “Act”), Pub.L. No. 109–248, 120 Stat. 587 (codified as amended in scattered sections of 18 and 42 U.S.C.A.). After an evidentiary hearing, the district court held that the government failed to prove Wooden suffered from pedophilia and failed to prove he would have serious difficulty refraining from re-offending. The court therefore dismissed the government's petition and ordered Wooden released. The government appeals. For the reasons set forth below, we reverse the district court's order and remand for reconsideration of the government's petition on the existing record.

I.

The Act authorizes the government to civilly commit “sexually dangerous” federal inmates after the expiration of their sentences. 18 U.S.C.A. § 4248(a). An inmate is a “sexually dangerous person” if he has a prior act or attempted act of child molestation or sexually violent conduct and is “sexually dangerous to others.” Id. § 4247(a)(5). An inmate is sexually dangerous to others if he “suffers from a serious mental illness, abnormality, or disorder as a result of which he would have serious difficulty refraining from sexually violent conduct or child molestation if released.” Id. § 4247(a)(6).

The Act's mental illness and serious-difficulty-refraining requirements ensure that commitment is limited to inmates with a volitional impairment—inmates “whose mental illness renders them dangerous beyond their control.” United States v. Francis, 686 F.3d 265, 274–75 (4th Cir.2012); see also United States v. Hall, 664 F.3d 456, 463 (4th Cir.2012) (“[T]he serious difficulty prong of § 4248's certification proceeding refers to the degree of the person's volitional impairment, which impacts the person's ability to refrainfrom acting upon his deviant sexual interests.” (internal quotation marks omitted)). As the Supreme Court has explained, the requirement that the inmate suffer from a volitional impairment is of “constitutional importance” because it works to “distinguish[ ] a dangerous sexual offender subject to civil commitment from other dangerous persons who are perhaps more properly dealt with exclusively through criminal proceedings. That distinction is necessary lest civil commitment become a mechanism for retribution or general deterrence—functions properly those of criminal law, not civil commitment.” Kansas v. Crane, 534 U.S. 407, 412, 122 S.Ct. 867, 151 L.Ed.2d 856 (2002) (citation & internal quotation marks omitted).

II.

A.

Wooden was born in March 1956 in Washington, D.C. Wooden's intellectual capacity is somewhat limited. He repeated the third grade and was expelled from school in the eighth grade. See J.A. 112. A 1978 evaluation classified Wooden's intellectual functioning as within the “dull normal range,” J.A. 75, and his I.Q. has been measured at 70, which qualifies as “borderline retarded,” J.A. 502.

When Wooden was eight or nine years old, he was sexually assaulted by a man in his neighborhood. Wooden did not report the abuse.

In January 1972 and again in April 1972, Wooden was adjudicated delinquent for committing rectal sodomy on a minor. In October 1973, Wooden again was adjudicated delinquent after sexually molesting a minor. A sentencing report prepared in connection with this offense indicated that Wooden had been arrested for sexual offenses against children at least six times since January 1972. In 1974, Wooden was charged as an adult and pleaded guilty to taking indecent liberties with a four-year-old child. Wooden was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, but he was paroled into the community in 1980. In 1984, after separate incidents involving an eight-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old boy, Wooden was convicted of various charges, including sodomy, and was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment. Wooden was paroled in 2000, but his parole was revoked in 2001 for failure to cooperate with the supervising officers. On July 25, 2002, Wooden was again paroled, and he was ordered to undergo long-term sex-offender treatment and testing.

Dr. Ronald Weiner supervised Wooden's court-ordered sex offender treatment. Wooden responded well enough to treatment that after about six months, Dr. Weiner recommended reducing the frequency of their sessions from once a week to once every other week. After about a year of treatment, Dr. Weiner recommended monthly sessions.

In May 2005, probation officer John Taberski was assigned to Wooden's case. Taberski called and introduced himself to Wooden and told Wooden that he had a “maintenance” polygraph examination coming up. J.A. 452. Wooden repeatedly told Taberski that he would refuse to take the polygraph. Wooden would not explain his concerns about the polygraph, and Taberski encouraged Wooden to discuss his apprehensions with Dr. Weiner. Taberski reported Wooden's reluctance to Paul Brennan, Taberski's supervisor. In conversations with the probation agents, Wooden admitted that he had had contact with children in the community and that children visited Wooden's apartment while he was alone there. See J.A. 452–54. When Taberski pressed Wooden about whether he was following the plans and using the relapse-avoidance skills developed in his treatment sessions, Wooden became angry, saying, “ ‘What do you expect me to do; there's nowhere for me to go.’ ” J.A. 455. Taberski called Dr. Weiner immediately after the home visit to report that Wooden had admitted to being around children not only in the community, but also in his apartment.

Dr. Weiner met with Wooden on June 3, 2005, for a counseling session. Wooden told Dr. Weiner that he had been “placing himself in high risk situations” by hiring himself out as a babysitter and that he had been having “deviant sexual thoughts about children.” J.A. 67. Wooden eventually told Dr. Weiner that, months earlier, he had had sexual contact with a seven-year-old boy he knew from the neighborhood. Wooden told Dr. Weiner that the boy had followed him to the laundry room in the basement of his apartment building. After Wooden pulled down his pants and showed the boy his penis, the boy also took off his pants, and Wooden placed his penis against the boy's buttocks without making any attempt to penetrate. Wooden reported that he then became upset with himself and changed his mind about engaging in sexual activity with the boy, who left after Wooden gave him five dollars.

On June 7, 2005, Wooden, Dr. Weiner, and probation officers Brennan and Taberski met for an emergency meeting convened by Dr. Weiner. At the meeting, Dr. Weiner explained to the others that Wooden had admitted to molesting the seven-year-old boy, and Wooden agreed. Wooden refused to provide the boy's full name, but he did provide the boy's address.

At a June 9 counseling session with Lesley Stamm, an associate of Dr. Weiner's, Wooden said that he had met the boy about a year earlier and that “the boy initiated their encounters because the boy wanted to have sex with him.” J.A. 152. Wooden told Stamm that he fought an “internal battle” over whether he should touch the boy and that he “entertain[ed] fantasies” about sodomizing the boy. J.A. 152. When discussing his interactions with the boy, however, Wooden vacillated between admitting to actual sexual contact with the boy and claiming that he had only dreamed about having sexual contact with the boy. See J.A. 152. In the earlier conversations with Dr. Weiner and the probation officers, Wooden never claimed that he had dreamed the encounter.

During a polygraph examination administered on June 20, 2005, Wooden admitted to having “deviant sexual thoughts about children in the past year” and to being sexually aroused in the presence of children in the past year. J.A. 68. Wooden acknowledged that he had engaged in sexual activity with a child in the past year and that he had attempted to engage in sexual activity with a different child. See J.A. 68, 153. According to the officer administering the polygraph, Wooden's answers to those questions were “non-deceptive.” J.A. 153. In a session with Dr. Weiner the next day, Wooden acknowledged that he was not being completely truthful about his sexual contacts with children. He told Dr. Weiner that, a couple of years earlier, he had lured a boy into the basement for sexual purposes but changed his mind and did not go through with the offense. See J.A. 152, 529–30.

Police officers investigating the incident interviewed Wooden, who told them the same story he had first told Dr. Weiner—that he placed his penis against the boy's buttocks but did not attempt penetration. The officers also interviewed the seven-year-old boy identified by Wooden. The presence of the police scared the boy, who worried that Wooden was “real mad...